Life in Germany

In the months of October and November every year, stories about the holocaust flood German media. I have for years followed these stories and every single time, my heart breaks into tiny pieces. It never becomes more bearable or easier to see the haunted eyes and the emaciated skeletal bodies of the victims of the Wehrmacht. I’m not sure what exactly drives me to watch or read these stories. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m deeply aware that as a foreigner, I would have been high on the...

I was reading this book by a Russian writer Victoriya Tokareva . The genius of the book like most great works lies in its simplicity. She talks about the men in her life. The ordinary misery, the poverty, the love, the betrayals, the alcohol and many other mundane things that make up human existence.

Whenever people use the term shocking, I get the feeling that they are just trying to be dramatic. There really is no need to use the term shocking to describe anything that’s not life threatening let alone in a blog post headline like I was planning to do. My first headline had 'shocking' prominently displayed in it but after going through it, I had to admit to myself that there was not just a tinge of drama in it but a healthy dose of laziness. The following are things that you are unlikely...

The past two weeks in Germany have been dominated by demonstrations in the Eastern German city of Chemnitz. A male resident of Chemnitz was stabbed to death and two others fatally wounded. Two suspects, both asylum seekers, one from Iraq and a Syrian were arrested. The residents held a demo to mourn and protest. The next day, thousands of neo-Nazis held an even bigger demo to protest against ‘criminal foreigners’. I live about 500 km away from Chemnitz in the south western part of Germany...